Theorizing celebrity cultures: Thickenings of media cultures and the role of cultural (working) memory

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of celebrity culture remains remarkably undertheorized in the literature, and it is precisely this gap that this article aims to begin filling in. Starting with media culture definitions, celebrity culture is conceptualized as collections of sense-making practices whose main resources of meaning are celebrity. Consequently, celebrity cultures are necessarily plural. This approach enables us to focus on the spatial differentiation between (sub)national celebrity cultures, for which the Flemish case is taken as a central example. We gain a better understanding of this differentiation by adopting a translocal frame on culture and by focusing on the construction of celebrity cultures through the ‘us and them’ binary and communities. Finally, it is also suggested that what is termed cultural working memory improves our understanding of the remembering and forgetting of actual celebrities, as opposed to more historical figures captured by concepts such as cultural memory.